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The Two Parachutes Podcast is a collaboration, well, more like a conversation, between a CEO and an FBI Agent. Shawn Baker-Garcia and Scott Olson first met when they were working at US Embassy Baghdad; Scott for the FBI and Shawn for the US State Department. Over the years they’ve worked together, given advice and assistance to each other, and now see that the synergy which comes from open, civil, and thoughtful discussion is very much needed in the modern discourse. Join them as they dive into everything interesting to humanity. The goal of 2PP is to recreate the experience most people have had when they stumble into an insightful conversation with a new acquaintance at a conference or a dinner party. The kind of conversation that makes the rest of the room stop talking and listen. The kind of conversation that gets your mind working as new thoughts tumble out. Let the 2 Parachutes Podcast drop into your world!
Hey, Scott.
Scott:Hey, Sean.
Shawn:Good to see you.
Scott:Good you. How are you?
Shawn:You know, man, I'm blessed. I I cannot complain. It's just been a really after I got over whatever that horrifying super bug was that I came down with.
Scott:Oh my God, you were on your ass for like two weeks.
Shawn:Two weeks, man. Like, yeah, in all fairness, I probably should have gotten COVID tested, but I'm always like super like, No, I'm fine. It's fine. And then it just kept, it was just like, it was this weird pattern where it would like, it was really, really bad. And then I'd kind of perk up and it'd be like, Okay, I'm feeling good.
Shawn:And then it would just crash me back down. But like incrementally it was progressively getting better. Like my lows were getting less low and my highs were getting higher, but I still kept going in these peaks and valleys. Boy, it knocked me on my straight up ass. I was like, woah.
Shawn:So, yeah, I couldn't hardly do anything. Was but, you know, mandatory vacation, like sick cation, I guess, is not the worst thing. I was definitely It's the
Scott:world sending you a message.
Shawn:For real. I don't argue with it. And I was like, well, there's not much I can do about it other than to just fight through it. And I tried to do what I could when I could. But yeah, I'm glad that's over with.
Shawn:You know, and it was getting a little bit nerve wracking because we had a wedding, you know. Shana is a young woman very close to my heart, and you know, she had lived with us during COVID for almost a year and a half, and she's been working with me since TCM, you know, my first company. And so it was her wedding in North Carolina, and, you know, I barely got better in time for it. It was, you know, we postponed leaving. We were supposed to leave on Friday, July 4, like early, early in the morning because we were spending the whole fourth of July weekend in Highlands, North Carolina, is just, by the way, man, gorgeous.
Shawn:That is just God's earth right there. But I told Greg, I said, well, one, I said, my ears are still really a little bit like, you know, tender and wonky. I said, and I got a ton of work I gotta catch up on. You know, I I said, so let me just spend the day at home and rather than being on the road eight hours, you know, and and so we ended up going Saturday, but her wedding was on that following Monday. So, you know, couple of days of R and R in North Carolina kind of pulled it all together.
Scott:Yeah. So your road trip, you didn't fly,
Shawn:We did. You know, and we chose to do that because one, North Carolina may be a destination of frequency for us moving forward, our original plan was to take the dog. And so we just kind of didn't deviate because by that point it was also too late to change the plan because flights would have been like ridiculously expensive. And then, you know, we wouldn't have where we were staying, it wouldn't have been conducive. We knew we needed to do a lot of driving.
Shawn:You know, honestly, eight hours is Greg and I do the Nebraska trip all the time. So eight hours is half that basically. So we're all good.
Scott:Yeah. Yeah. And if you have the dog, you're going to take breaks and it's a it's a full day of driving, but that's bad.
Shawn:Yeah.
Scott:That trip, that's just 95 South, right?
Shawn:I think that's the right it was, yeah, for the most part. Really pretty, it's not a bad view. Most of it's Virginia, to be honest. Ironically. So I thought that was kind of interesting.
Shawn:I was like, damn, the state's bigger than I thought. I've always gone west or north. I don't go south very frequently, in Virginia at least, and and so that was a whole new I mean, we've been to Richmond once since we've you know, in the last ten years, you know, it's the furthest I've ever gotten. But and that was recently. That was only, like, earlier this year.
Shawn:So it's you know? So I haven't really seen a lot of, you know, anything south of like Fredericksburg or or. Well, no, that's not true. We did do the what was the one old Williamsburg and Yorktown and stuff, which is that that's awesome. I love that.
Scott:Yeah, there's there's definitely historic points to see in Virginia.
Shawn:Very beautiful and historic stuff indeed. But how are you? How was fourth of July?
Scott:Well, before we get too far along, happy birthday.
Shawn:Oh, right. Crap.
Scott:Today is your actual freaking birthday.
Shawn:It is. The big 5.2.
Scott:Yeah, I was gonna say, what's it like being 40? I mean
Shawn:Again and again and again. You know, it gets better every year. No, 52 is actually pretty darn okay in my book right now. You know, have kind of, well, knock on wood, I think I'm clearing most of the sort of the woman life change stuff and as things kind of even. And you know, it's funny, I've been seeing things pop up in my social media feeds talking about this probably because it's listening to me and it hears stuff.
Shawn:But you know, if the internet is to be believed, I think that women struggle in their 40s and then by the time they get into their 50s, at some point during their early 50s, it would appear the evidence suggests that things start to even out and then your health starts to improve and your hormones start to settle down and stuff. So for me, that has been the case. Now I've had to actively seek help to get there, you know, medically and from just a lifestyle perspective. But yeah, 52 feels a lot better than any of the last prior five, six, seven years have.
Scott:Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. And for me as a man, I think it's important. I mean, I've been in relationships now three times with women who are in that age range and going through perimenopause and menopause. And it's, I remember when my daughters were young, and I I mean, I have two daughters and a son, and a great relationship with all of them.
Scott:And I remember my oldest waiting for me to come home and running out of the house and jumping up and down when she was about 13 going, Dad, dad, I got my dot today. I got my dot. It took me a second to understand what that meant. But it was so sweet to see her And, through you know, Women take care of girls when they're going through that.
Shawn:Yeah, absolutely.
Scott:What I have seen is when women are on the other end and men don't go through this. We just there are so many things about women where men need to understand they're frickin spectators. Spectators, and it's you know when your daughter's bodies change and then later when your wife's bodies change, and then you know when your partner, if she has a baby, I mean, I remember when our first child was born, just realizing, you know, I can go through all the parenting classes and the birthing classes, but her body is doing this amazing thing and she's having this incredible experience. Whether a woman loves it or hates it, I am a mere spectator. And I think men need to understand that.
Scott:And it's particularly sensitive to circle back around to you, you do need help. The medical technology is amazing.
Shawn:It's so good.
Scott:I've had partners and family members with the little heart monitor on as the medication is getting dialed in, and it's so important to well-being. It's not like you can sort of grit your teeth and get through it. So as a spectator, I think it's an interesting experience. You going through it, I actually can't imagine what it's like
Shawn:living in a woman. Yeah, I don't know. I would also just say this because there's a lot of, you know, and it is, well, I would say men are spectators in the sense that you're not physically going through it. You are participants in the sense that many of you are proximate to us, right, as we go through those changes. And I think a lot of times the media, you know, if you were to just listen to the kind of loudest voices on the internet, people are not very compassionate for the male perspective sometimes on all of this stuff because they don't know what the heck's going on.
Shawn:And honestly, there's a lot of complaint, and I think a lot of it is very rightly made is that, wow, they don't tell us stuff and as women, we don't know. Here's my take on all that because, like, I'm all about, like, bridging information gaps and, you know, just honoring kind of what our ancestors gone went through and kind of where we're at and like what we're going to, you know, kind of pass on to our daughters in the future and our sons is that we did the best we could with the information that we had at the time for each generation. And I don't think my mother's generation or any generations prior to my mom are going through the same exact experiences that women that are coming up on the Gen X age group are currently going through. And now I'm not a doctor. I don't have a degree in science or psychology or anything.
Shawn:But what I can say is we are seeing, I think, in other aspects of our physical well-being and lifespan longevity of Gen X, I think we consumed a lot of crap that our parents did not consume in the way of processed food and chemicals and all sorts of other things that were associated with what was considered innovation and really cool innovation and convenience at the time. But now fast forward to 2025 and oh damn, phthalates or phthalates or whatever the heck you call it are killing us, like red dye is killing us. We're now realizing that a lot of the stuff that we've been actually consuming regularly since we were children, and again, these things were not prior consumed by our moms, particularly in our grandmothers, I think as a result, we women go into this perimenopause menopause experience in this day and age are probably experiencing unique differences in that process. It may be worse. I'm going to guess it's probably worse for us than what our moms and grandmothers had experienced.
Shawn:And so you layer on top of the fact that it's not really something that's been in the public commentary space. We certainly weren't talking to men about this in decades prior. So rather than just beat up on everybody, Oh, men don't know anything and they need to shut up, Men aren't compassionate. Well, okay, we didn't know anything, so how could they know anything? You know what I mean?
Shawn:And partly why we didn't know anything is, one, maybe our parents just didn't share that as easily or as commonly, even among the females of the clan, you know? But also, they may not have had as much to report. You know what I mean? Who knows? I don't know.
Shawn:My mom, you know, she has a few things to say about it, but it doesn't, you know, it didn't seem like it was anything near what I had been going through, what my sister's going through, what my female peers my age are going through. And I'm like, it's got to be then attributed to this just different, this total lifestyle shakeup that happened in the late 70s and 80s. So that's my 2¢ on it. But I will also say that it is largely also dependent on how good your doctors are. I mean, because yeah, there's a lot of great medical innovation and technology and a lot of it has, I've used some of it, but you have to have the right doctors and you have to be able to kind of advocate for yourself and to know what you're looking for.
Shawn:I'll also say I'm a little weird. I've done some weird non doctor stuff that I kind of am right now really swearing by. My latest thing is this whole idea of grounding or earthing, and they sell sheets and shoes and stuff. Scott Olson, the sheets are phenomenal. I have not had such good sleep in years and I kind of did some blind testing on it, not deliberately because we went to, I was telling you, we went to North Carolina.
Shawn:We'd had the sheets for a week and a half. We go to North Carolina, totally undoes all of my great sleep and now I'm not sleeping at all. But my girlfriend, well, actually know, you remember my girlfriend, Dawn Verdugo?
Scott:Oh yeah, Dawn.
Shawn:Okay, she house sits for us when we go out of town. So she was sleeping in the sheets and she's going through the life change, or I shouldn't be talking about Dawn online, but let you know. Anyway, she didn't care. But she texts me and she's like, What is this voodoo magic sheet situation you've got going on? Because she, the first night had amazing sleep.
Shawn:So anyway, I'll stop on my little soapbox rants about that. So yes, good medicine, good doctors, but also look at some of this homeopathic natural stuff, get outside, touch the earth. Listen,
Scott:I love that because it matters and I think it matters in two ways. I mean, something actually truly psychosomatic, you're taking a placebo but you think it makes you feel better, then you feel better.
Shawn:Either way.
Scott:If you think you're in pain and there's no indication that you should be, you're in pain. The pain is powerful. Remember that actor Michael Landon?
Shawn:Oh I love Michael Landon, yes.
Scott:Yeah, so for folks who are listening Google Michael Landon. He tells a story that you remind me of and that the guy died many years ago. Yeah,
Shawn:young too if I recall.
Scott:Yeah it was horrible but what I didn't know until he told this story was that in college he was a javelin thrower and he's a little dude.
Shawn:Yeah, was He
Scott:was in high school and college, he was setting records in the javelin even though he was a little dude he was throwing it I don't know how it but was just incredibly good and he goes at the time he wouldn't cut his hair he had hair down his back and he would he would tell everybody I'm Samson you know the good
Shawn:story of Samson never
Scott:cut his hair and so he had this thing going where he's Samson and he could chuck this javelin and then one day a bunch of his friends as a joke sort of held him down and cut his hair off and he started throwing 50 feet less on the javelin because he was Samson and his hair had been cut. Yeah. And just listening to him tell the story and he looks in the camera and he goes the mind is a very powerful thing and I just couldn't do it anymore. And I think you need to take everything that comes to you and use it. So there's the brain part of it, but the grounded part of it, I hear that all the time.
Scott:I had a cousin who was a tutor, and she would only do a tutoring session if she was in bare feet, because she needed to be touching the ground in order to connect to the student, And I hear that over and over again. What you're doing with the groundedness, I mean, fundamentally, I don't think we, you know, the popular thing nowadays is to say, well, I'm not a doctor, and I don't know. My attitude is a pretty blunt instrument. I'm like, Come on, I'm a dude, you're a chick. We're equivalent in terms of value to humanity, but we are not the same.
Scott:Yeah. We have different physical skills.
Shawn:Physiology. Yeah.
Scott:We have different biological challenges.
Shawn:That's right.
Scott:And the only way that we get through that, we, is in our partnerships and talking. Sometimes women need to talk to women. Sometimes men need to talk to men. Sometimes we need to talk together to get through these things. But it circles back around to that value of humanity, recognizing that I'm not you, and you're not And it's not that that's okay, it's that you're going to be, and this is advice from Scott Olson to the world, you're going to be much more successful if you live in the world you're in instead of the world you wish you were in, you know, and I'll say one more thing, and then throw it back to you, because this is just one of the things that has it's bothered me over the years, and now I find it humorous, is people who won't eat meat.
Scott:Because I think that is a particularly insidious form of self loathing. And anyone who doesn't want to eat meat, no judgement for me, go ahead and do that, but it's just amazing to me that you can look at your own body. You have canines and incisors. We're omnivores. We can eat plants.
Scott:We can eat meat. I get the whole I don't want to kill animals ethic, but the bottom line is the human body is designed to consume and process animal flesh, and to reject that I think, creates mental problems. If you accept it and choose not to do it, that's different. But if you say this thing is bad, and so I reject it, what you're actually doing is rejecting yourself. And I think that's terribly problematic.
Scott:You don't have to be an unrepentant carnivore to get there, but be in the world you're in, not the world you wish for, and I think mental health comes from that and all the other things that you're talking about.
Shawn:No, it's kind of like all of those, well, and this started like in the 90s, but maybe late 90s, I guess. Well, and there's been some version of it, I guess, in the 80s, there was a lot of health food stores, health food stores and whatnot, but like it's just this idea that humans are always kind of circling it, you know, and and it takes different expression in every sort of decade, but this is the idea that we know instinctively we are supposed to get back to a more natural way of living, right? And for me, this whole grounding earthing movement is just the latest expression of that, which is, and again, I've read about kind of the science, but I don't have it well enough cemented in my brain to regurgitate it usefully for anyone. But essentially, it has something to do with the fact that when our bare feet are touching the earth, that's a relationship, right? It's not just random person on the ground.
Shawn:Is something at a, I don't know if it's a molecular or, you know, they talk about electrons moving, like it's energy. You know what I mean? It's the idea of like energy and passing or flowing through, you know, the earth to us as living creatures. That opening up of that channel or that pathway allows certain types or electrons to get into the body, which then has different effects on blood flow and on free radical movement. Whether that's a good or a bad thing, I couldn't say.
Shawn:I just remember that being part of it, what I was reading. And so it just, all of that then, and something about sort of balancing out your cortisol levels. And it's so crazy. I was like, I was desperate. I'm like, I'll try anything.
Shawn:At this point, I'll try anything because I can't. I've got chronic insomnia, which is giving me chronic fatigue. I am dealing on top of all of the lady stuff, I'm dealing with a loosely diagnosed autoimmune disorder issue, which could be lupus or Sjogren's. And so I've got chronic inflammation for which I'm taking Plaquenil, is hydroxychloroquine. I've been on that for about a year and a half.
Shawn:But with these grounding sheets, it was like immediate. Like it was just immediate. I fall asleep. It's like I time myself now. You know, I was having such a hard time falling asleep.
Shawn:Now it's just like it's like a five, four, three, two, one and I'm out. Can't explain that. Like to me, that goes beyond placebo because again, did it a week and a half, went to North Carolina, slept like shit for three days. Meanwhile, Dawn was enjoying all the sleep, you know, because she was sleeping in my bed, know, come back. And it's not just me, Greg is also like, you know, and he has other like sleep issues associated with, you know, being in the military and stuff like that.
Shawn:So for him too. So, I mean, if it's just a matter of getting our human bodies to touch the ground again, we benefit, because we're biologically biologically designed designed to to benefit from it because we come from the earth and we return to the like to me that that's a no brainer, you know, that like that makes all the sense in the world why that would be true, even without being able to define the science, you know?
Scott:Sure, sure. And it's I'm with you. I mean, you think about it, we were born, we live and we die in a magnetic field. The Earth has a magnetic field, and it reminds me of I love watching astronaut stuff and particularly some of the documentaries that are coming out of old flights like the Apollo thirteen flight and the Apollo eight flight. Ones that are well, 13 is famous, but eight didn't land on the moon but they were the first ones to go to the moon and that sort of thing.
Scott:And one of them talked about how hard it is to be in space because it's never night and I'm like I would never have thought of that because space is dark, so I would think it was always night. But the reason is that when you get off the earth, night is when you're on the side of the earth that isn't facing the sun, so the entire earth and its magnetic field is blocking you from the sun. That's what night is when you think about it. You're in the shadow of the earth. You're on the backside of the earth that's facing away from the sun.
Scott:When you go into space, you're out of the earth's shadow. That space capsule is always in the sun.
Shawn:Constantly. Oh yeah.
Scott:Okay. You think that the issue in space is staying warm. Actually the issue in space is staying cool because you're constantly you go you know you're on the space station and you're going on the dark side of the earth and you're cooling off you're always in the sun, but I think you're also either outside of that the earth's magnetic sphere, you're in a different level of it. We talk about our body's energy, but we don't correlate that with the magnetic space of the planet that's what drives a compass is the magnetic circuit or the magnetic field of Earth. If you separate yourself from that by being civilized, I'm a fan of indoor plumbing.
Scott:I'm a fan of air conditioning in summer and heat in the winter. But when you put your feet on the ground and you get past modern sensibilities of, oh, that's dirty and don't bring that in the house. And I'm a fan of that. I know people just take their shoes off when they come into my house too. But that connection is fundamental to life.
Scott:I'll go one further. I mean, we talk a lot about food, right? So we're doing things to our bodies all the time and connecting to the energy that's around us, the magnetic energy, the electrical energy. People talk about how their phone is going to give them head cancer, and I haven't seen evidence But of it's all about energy. So we talk about it all the time.
Scott:But I think what we miss is the tempo. And as we look at the food industry, we're sort of coming back around to this notion that's been lost probably for one hundred years of eating what's in season and I think our body's energy resonates and it resonates because we live on a planet that has different seasons. And so, you know, I've gone from, you know, drinking red wine with beef and white wine with fish to drinking red wine in the winter and white wine in the summer.
Shawn:Oh, interesting.
Scott:Well I think about it this way if I'm sitting next to a fire because it's cold outside a nice cold Sauvignon Blanc may be delicious but it's not what I want. I want a nice room temperature Rioja from Northern Spain or Cabernet from somewhere. In the summer when it's 85 degrees out and I'm hanging out with my friends on the deck that room temperature red wine isn't what my body wants. I want a chablis. I want something that's nice and cool.
Scott:Why? To go with the food that I'm eating. And so it's not just, hey, if you eat what's in season, it's more fresh and it tastes better. I think the things that are in season as the seasons change, the seasons change affects your body, and so the things that are being grown in the spring are the things that your body needs because your body is in the spring as well. And I find more and more if I live in the season and I eat seasonally and I consume alcohol seasonally and I do seasonal things, I am more in tune.
Shawn:Did you come up with that yourself or is this something you saw somebody talk about? Because that's a really interesting concept.
Scott:So for me, I didn't see somebody say do this, but it's not like I came up with this out of whole cloth. The Scott Olson pathway is to take all the ingredients that come in and put them together in a way that makes sense. So I'm just plucking them in. I'm very fortunate to have my youngest daughter is in the food industry.
Shawn:And
Scott:she's worked. She was a senior sous chef at a place called Alinea, which is a Michelin three star restaurant in Chicago. And you know she manages a big farm to table bakery now and she's she's an incredible person. And so I've learned a lot from her about seasonal stuff. Then, you know, I watch cooking shows and Netflix has a number of shows that are about great people in the sort of the cooking world, and I'm interested in the personalities.
Scott:This one spends all this time making pasta, and this one makes pizza, and this one cooks with fire and they're just they're amazing personalities. So it's all those pieces that come in and then I'm 63 you know and I remember hearing somebody say you know getting old is not for the faint of heart. And I'm fortunate like you that I've got good genetics, but it's also really important to me, as me, to pay attention to all this, because when I don't, I physically feel bad, and I don't like feeling bad. And so it's the interaction with the environment that makes the difference, and I don't think that I should not drink wine or, you know, not drink gin or scotch. But I need to understand how it affects my body so that I can enjoy it and make it work for me.
Shawn:Right. I mean, versus working against you. Yeah.
Scott:Exactly. And then, you know, I am not really an Epicurean, and I'm certainly not a great chef. I mean, I'm a dude. Right? So I can great at breakfast and great at meat.
Scott:But, you know, I'm not really great at, like, making sauces or following a recipe. But, you know, at some point, I'm a dude, and so I just need a partner who can make sauces.
Shawn:Yeah, or he enjoys that.
Scott:Yeah. Roast fish and do those things.
Shawn:So you're looking at the food portion of it while I'm on the other end of that spectrum where I mean, I try to eat mindfully. Right? And I you know, in our household, nothing is really off limits. Like, we're I'm fortunate in that Greg and Sadie and most of the people in my life have a pretty diverse palette. So we always have something for everybody, which is nice because then you can kind of make sure everybody's taken care of.
Shawn:But what I've been obsessing with in the last month or so, maybe longer now is, you know, going back to this idea of cooking. What are we cooking with and what are we putting our food into? Because again, I'm like on this anti chemical kick right now, which is trying to identify, how do we store our food and like what kinds of utensils and cookware are we using and is it contributing to consumption of plastics? There's a horrifying article I came across the other day. And at first when I read it, I thought it was gonna be an article that's basically saying, I'm making too big a deal, everyone's making too big a deal out of this whole like humans consuming plastic, you know?
Shawn:But it was the opposite because it kind of set you up to feel like, oh, am I overthinking this? And am I just wasting all my time by worrying about whether that's Teflon coated or whether that's silicon versus steel? But no, it was actually and it was in The Atlantic. So I mean, this is like a legitimate publication, you know, and basically it was just saying like, it's futile. There's literally plastic and everything and you're not going to be able to get out from underneath it, which, know, anyway, which I didn't know how to feel about that because I'm just like, so the best I can do then is just what I have started to do now is slowly, I'm just looking up regular things that we use in this household the most.
Shawn:I'm now starting to do research on, does it contain these forever chemicals, these phthalates, any other kind of like toxins. And then I'm just, we're experimenting by identifying alternative products that don't have all of that bad stuff and that are, you know, certified. I think there's some association or organization like the something, I want to say it's EWG or something, I have to look that up, that, you know, if it, you know, especially for like body care products and stuff that if it's certified by that entity, then, you know, you can be comfortable that it doesn't contain the harmful stuff that whatever is killing us all. But anyway, we're all dying anyway. I get that.
Shawn:But if I can switch out my deodorant or if I can switch out my laundry detergent or if I can switch out, you know what I mean? Like your dishwashing detergent, just the things that you're using every single day. If I can store my stuff in glass versus plastic, if I can cook with cast iron or steel versus, you know, some or or or I think they actually do make Teflons that don't have those bad chemicals in them but like you have to do a lot of homework on that and figure that out but then then I just want to do that because I do think it's disrupting our endocrine systems. I do think it's disrupting fertility for women. I do think it's disrupting or causing inflammation in the body, you know, chronically, probably so.
Shawn:And so, yeah, so it's a couple of like, you know, if you look at like, what am I actually consuming and then how am I actually receiving that, whether it's the packaging that comes in or, you know, one of the things I realized that is just like they're just like red flags and alarms going off is like, you know, whenever your kid gets those like cup of noodles or like the packages that have anything that has like a waxy coating on the inside, things like lipstick that is designed to not wash off because you want all twenty four hour wear, they advertise this stuff. That's actually some of the worst stuff because it has to have those specific chemicals that adhere to your skin or that preserve the product it's containing. So it's an education. Here's the thing, people don't have time in their day to know all of this stuff. So I've toyed around with the idea of creating a blog post where it's like, I've already done all the research.
Shawn:If I can just put up on a website, here's the top five deodorant for men and women that you can rest assured these are free of anything horrible, then that might be useful to society. I don't know. But yeah, it's overwhelming.
Scott:Yeah, it is. It's funny the thing that really hit me last year was shredded cheese.
Shawn:Oh tell me what's happening with the shredded cheese Scott?
Scott:And I didn't notice but if you get a package of shredded cheese, all of the shredded cheese bits are actually coated in wood cellulose. The reason they are, it's wood cellulose so it's not toxic.
Shawn:I
Scott:mean you don't really want to eat a tree branch but the reason that it's coated is because if it's not coated then all the cheese sticks to itself.
Shawn:Clumps up
Scott:and not what you're looking for when you're sprinkling cheese on your taco and you know the experiment is first read the package and it actually says contents whole milk, cheese, whatever, and then it'll say some kind of cellulose. If you take a block of cheese, which is what I do now, and just shred it up and it's a lot quicker than it used to annoy me to shred cheese because I thought it would take a long time and be a waste of time. It actually doesn't take that long. I can shred a two pound block of cheese into a big bag of shredded cheese in about five minutes. Yeah.
Scott:Simple, but it all clumps together and so two days from now when I'm taking the shredded cheese that's been sitting in my refrigerator, and putting it on my taco meat, I have to shake the bag so it loosens it up, but it demonstrates that if you just shred cheese, it sticks together, and it's not the worst thing in the world. But for me, the point is all of this stuff that goes into food is not a conspiracy theory. It's actually, people who work for companies who are trying to solve the problems that they face.
Shawn:Mean, well convenience, right? And the consumers demand it, so you can kind of understand where it's coming from.
Scott:Right, it's convenience but it's also things like refrigeration.
Shawn:When,
Scott:I don't know, 100 ago or something before the advent of refrigeration, you couldn't ship meat across the country because it would spoil. And so the reason that you had, you know, salt meat is because the salt takes the moisture out and preserves it. And there are a lot of different foods around the world that are unique and delicious, or this culture or that culture thinks it's delicious. But most of those foods had their genesis in how do we preserve this so that when we eat it two months from now, it won't make us sick. And that gets us back to the temple of life, and it's not make sure that everything that you get is locally sourced.
Scott:You're probably going to get things that are locally sourced if you start eating seasonally, and the reason we have preservatives and additives is because when you go to a supermarket and you get food that is just on the shelf, it's not in a refrigerator, that food has been created so that it can sit in the package for months.
Shawn:Yeah, as long as possible.
Scott:Yeah, and when you are dealing with a lack of technology, a lack of refrigeration, it's a good thing to do that, to have food that doesn't spoil. But we take a good thing and we take it too far. So now we have these over processed foods. I love some of them. You're snapping to a Slim Jim.
Scott:That is meat that is on the counter in the gas station store and I can you know get gas in my car and whip open the Slim Jim and have some protein but it is highly processed and highly seasoned even though I think I'm given my body protein but I can have it because if I take a slice of steak from last night, it's good maybe for this morning, but I can't take it on a road trip and have it be good for two days. And so to me, it's less about the food industrial complex is bad and more about what's the temple of living. And what I get from you is exploring options. Your piece about teflon pans, I have had a number of partners who don't understand why I use old caliphon seven layer steel pans because the food sticks. And what I have understood listening to my daughter is that the food doesn't stick if you have the skill set.
Scott:You manage the heat
Shawn:in your
Scott:pan, unless you want it to stick so that you can dump some wine in there and deglaze.
Shawn:She is teaching you stuff.
Scott:It's awesome but again why do we have all this teflon? Like you say that because the consumer wants it the consumer wants to be able to put a pan on the stove put heat on it and not worry about it burning yeah and it's because we have technology that makes it so we don't have to pay attention. And it's just so funny to me that we're struggling with our bodies in the modern age, and at the same time we're struggling with our bodies, we're not paying attention to food, we're not paying attention to preparing food, we want to make that the minimum part of our life and it should be the maximum part of our life because it's our bodies. We should be.
Shawn:It's how we sustain life. Kind of a big deal.
Scott:Well, it's funny. You have a dinner party and most people will say, well, when I have a dinner party, don't even bother setting the table now because everybody's in the kitchen. Why is everybody in the kitchen? Well, it's because where everything's happening, but it's where life is. Because it's where food is.
Scott:It's because it's where everything's happening. If you're bored and you want a hobby, Scott Olsen's opinion? Learn to cook. Learn cook.
Shawn:Yeah learn things about cooking.
Scott:Learn how to put a pan on the stovetop and manage the heat and take because cooking really is just about taking a thing and putting heat into it. That's what it is.
Shawn:Changing its physical state somehow.
Scott:Yeah, and it does. I don't know. I get that it's not for everybody. Do. And there are parts of it that aren't for me, but everything you say resonates with me.
Scott:And it's actually being connected instead of I see so many people saying, well, don't want to be like my parents or my grandparents, or my grandmother spent all her time in the kitchen. I don't want to do that. I want to have a life. I want to live life. Guess what?
Scott:Your grandmother had a life.
Shawn:Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's a never heard truer statement. Yeah.
Scott:Yeah. I mean, remember when I was a little boy going and picking blackberries.
Shawn:Yeah. Same, same.
Scott:Going up with no notice at all, knocking on my grandma's door and saying, how many more do you need me to get before you make a blackberry cobbler? And I couldn't understand why she would roll her eyes and go, okay, I'll make one or I can't do it today because I thought, like every magic thing, was just sort of an easy thing. Had no idea the work that it took. I thought all the work was getting the blackberries because I'm nine years old. Blackberry cobbler made by my grandma, but she had a life.
Shawn:Yeah, well, so when you said that, what it made me think of is the fact that, you know, we humans are so good at creating problems for ourselves, right? So like, you know, we think about and we place all this strong emphasis on innovation and invention and we're trying to constantly, it seems, facilitate a life that we can, where there are efficiencies and, you know, like the busy hustle bustle, all of these things are designed to kind of make our life, to find free time, right? But we've gotten away from, I think this is to your point, we've gotten away from the basic fundamentals of living a life where you honor and take time to select and prepare the food that nourishes your body and your very life, the thing that actually gives you that life force. And then, we're constantly looking for convenience, tools of convenience, that again, we're saving time to save time for what to doom scroll on your phone to, you know, whereas I think if we just set it all down and said, I'm gonna know, they'll somebody I don't remember years ago when I started paying attention to food and stuff, it's like, I remember somebody saying, and I'm sure this is mostly common knowledge, get maybe not.
Shawn:But when you go to a grocery store, stay on the perimeter because everything internal to the perimeter is all of that process stuff you're talking about. Whereas the produce section and the cooler section, which has like, you know, where you have to cold store things, you know, that's where you're going to find the freshest, less least processed stuff. And so I won't say I adhere to that all the time, but again, like if you're gonna go down the snack aisle, it's like, what am I looking at? It's like, okay, I'm gonna get, you know, a jar of popcorn kernels versus the ones in the bags because the ones in the bag and oh, by the way, those are some of the worst offenders for chemicals because those inside of those bags are chemical coating to allow the magic popping to happen, right? Whereas if you just get the jar, like, you you pour it in and then you just pan pop it.
Shawn:I mean, it's old fashioned and it's but those are things, again, like it's taking time to honor the source that, you know, and to, you know, you don't have to be, you know, of any particular religious background to just be grateful for the thing that is giving you life assistance. For me as a Christian in particular, I I try to remain grateful. Food in the past was never a given. Food was not a given. Now it's just so convenient.
Shawn:People have forgotten that it wasn't always a given to just have food and just trying to practice active gratitude. Like that alone, it gives you time to do that and to kind of place the appropriate value on the role that that food has in your life. And so, I don't know, I encourage people to just try to make more mindful choices with food and then try to honor those choices. Know it seems that the cheese thing is blowing me away, man, because that honestly, I'm like, oh my gosh. I would never in a million years have thought of that.
Shawn:And again, the wood cellulose may not be as bad for you as some of these other forever chemicals are, but the idea is it's such a good analogy for the idea, which is that just get the natural cheese in its natural form and grate it. It's not, it really, you don't even have to do the whole bag. You just, I only need it for three little tacos. I just, you know, just do it, wrap it and put it back. Like, you know, it seems so simple.
Shawn:I will actually, Greg and I are going to have that conversation because I'm like, I think I just stumbled with something. And it's an easy fix. Like, that's an easy fix. Even if it just makes a little bit of a better difference in our life and, you know, what we're consuming, then I'm all for it, man. Just think again, we got to get back to, we got to simplify.
Shawn:The other issue, and this is a whole other podcast topic and one I deeply want to explore, is I think part of what we're seeing now, and this goes back to your point where you're talking about shipping the meat across like like a continent or, you know, like different states is that at some point, humans have over exceeded scale. Like we're trying to live life at a scale that is ultimately not sustainable. And so I don't know what that means practically speaking. I'm not like saying I'm advocating for like cutting The US up into different states or countries but like or but we're already in different states. But I do think there's a there there about why it's so hard to govern our country as time goes on.
Shawn:We're just all so different because we're trying to make things work across such a massive scale, it was never designed to work efficiently at that scale. So you're going to introduce things that are ultimately either not practically sustainable functionally or they're not good for you somehow. You know what I mean?
Scott:I don't know. Think that we can see the progression. I live in Seattle, so if you live in the Pacific Northwest and you don't know any other place, the food here is great. Yeah, king salmon that comes from the Deep Pacific, oysters that come from the Olympic Peninsula, you got you know beef farms and fruit farms in in Eastern Washington, and you think everything's fine, and everything is fine because it's a great place to be, and then all of a sudden you have the ability to travel, and it's not just like get on a train and go to Nebraska, but you can get on an aircraft and in eight hours you can be in Europe and all of a sudden you find this stuff called caviar, which you didn't even know existed, and now you're at home and all of a sudden you're king salmon and your oysters aren't good enough, you want caviar, and then the question becomes, well how do you get caviar from where it's made here? And all of a sudden now you need logistics, and now you need preservation.
Scott:As we are able to move, we see things that are different. We're coming from just knowing what's in our village to being aware of what's in other villages and wanting that too. Now all of a sudden, have mission creep. And now all of a sudden, we specialize. We got, you know, different purveyors that do different things, and we've created preservation processes that allow it to be shipped out.
Scott:You know, the slaughterhouses in Chicago eighty years ago or whenever they were came into existence with refrigeration. The reason that you would drive cattle is you would drive cattle up to Chicago. So there was one central location where beef was turned into hamburger, and then it was shipped out in refrigeration cars from there. It's great, and it's efficient, and it drives the cost down, all of which is good, but it brings this other stuff. For me, in our current time, which is modern now, but twenty years from now will be old, it's all about tempo.
Scott:And we're in a rush, and I think every generation has been in a rush because where you are is faster than it was twenty years ago. And it doesn't matter if you're in 2025 or 1925 or 1825. The current technology was modern and the tempo of life was faster than it was twenty years previously. It's not slowing the tempo down. It's recognizing that there's a tempo and being in tune with the tempo.
Scott:There's a great thing that I collected years ago that talked about music, and what great musicians do to create music. And it talked about the rest in music. And the point that it was trying to make is that a great musician will play when it's the turn to play, and then will rest when it's time for other musicians in the orchestra or in the band to play. And the point was there's no music in arrest, but there is the making of music in it. Sometimes you need to speak, and sometimes you need to be silent, sometimes you need to play, and sometimes you need to rest.
Scott:It's understanding that in our lives that I think is important because it's about tempo. It's about being in tune, not with some universal tempo. Okay, now I'm aligned with the tempo, but the tempo is different every day. It's different in the morning than it is in the afternoon, and finding a way to align so that you resonate, instead of, being in syncopation or leading to some sort of cacophony is where happiness comes from. And so, I like Milky Way bars.
Scott:I like Doritos.
Shawn:Yeah, oh my gosh, My
Scott:body can't process milk anymore, but every once in a while a bowl of cat and crunch and milk, and I'll pay for it in a couple of hours, but there's that. When I'm in that part of the music I find that I'm not happy and I'm not satisfied and I'm not okay if I see that thing as bad and I withhold. But at the same time, if I have Cap'n Crunch and a Snickers bar and two bags of Doritos every day, I'm going to be as big of the house and I'm not going to be happy.
Shawn:There'll be a lot of other problems too.
Scott:Yeah. So tempo. I'm a big fan of tempo, and it's one of the great things about being in my early 60s is you've seen tempo, you've seen all this stuff, and you know, old people sound like old people for a reason. I mean, some people have had one year of experience 20 times, some people have had twenty years of experience, and so just because someone's old doesn't mean they're wise. And just because someone's young doesn't mean they're not wise.
Scott:But we should make t shirts that say tempo because it really is.
Shawn:No, it's and I will say just on a. Maybe a concluding note of optimism. I I take heart at the next generation
Scott:concluding note of optimism.
Shawn:I will. Will say that that you know, I am a little hard on the generations that are coming up after us just because I see a lot of behaviors and patterns that I think are fundamentally going to undermine their success unless they grow out of them or unless they course correct at some point. A lot of it has to do with digital, like, you know, footprint and media use and stuff. But one thing that at least from my small little vantage point watching my nephews and my stepdaughter Sadie is that they are interestingly, I think they have better eating habits than we did. I mean, do enjoy their sweets and treats, but I just remember being as a kid in the 80s, like, dude, we were up at the Five and Dime shop, we face down in sugar every moment we could get our chance.
Shawn:And I just am not seeing that with these kids. It's not that they don't eat treats and sweets, it's just they don't do it with the veracity and addictive, you know, expression that I think we did. You know, I can remember literally every, maybe not every day, but frequently before the bell rang for elementary school, we had a little, you know, not not a like a mini market but it wasn't like a chain or anything. It was just a local, you know, one.
Scott:Yeah, sure.
Shawn:And and I'd be, I'd have like change in my pocket that god only knows where I got it. I probably stole it from couch cushions or car floorboards. Because my parents certainly weren't giving me the money. Somehow I'd scrounge up some amount of change and then I would go and they would sell at the counters 5 like cents, 10¢ candies, like all these. And I would just load up all these things, you know?
Shawn:And, you know, you mentioned the Captain Cruncher stuff. Like, I was always trying to get my hands on sugar cereal and I was, you know, we loved Twinkies. And I mean, it's just, you know, and then we were constantly eating bad stuff like, you know, cheap fast food and stuff because it was cheap and it was convenient and our parents weren't very wealthy and like it or you know, they were flat broke poor. Let me just say what it was. Like, we were destitute most of the time.
Shawn:So, I just, yeah, you know, and maybe part of it is, like our situation is the kids are at an economically sounder place than what our families were. So, that probably also has something to do with it. And maybe kids who are struggling at the poverty line are still eating a bunch of sugar and I don't know. But I would like to think that it's just becoming less common if for no other reason, because the little mongrels won't go outside. You know what I mean?
Shawn:That alone is gonna cut out a whole sugar source. Exactly. Where we were out there hustling for sugar, whether it was the ice cream truck or the corner store, I don't know.
Scott:Hustling for sugar. Yeah. Lifestyle back then. I agree. I agree.
Shawn:My goodness.
Scott:That's wonderful. That's wonderful.
Shawn:Yeah. Well, we've conquered food, Scott. We just need to unveil a natural eating plan for America.
Scott:We've either conquered or we've taken a bite out of it.
Shawn:Hey, there you go. I'll take that for the win. I think that's our high note here. We probably can't do better than that.
Scott:Yeah. Alright. Well, as always, great talking with you. We've nailed it in another hour. It flew by.
Shawn:It was really good. And I love, again, the just, you know, the direction we go. There's so much in the world to cover. There's so much good conversation that needs to be had around the world. And I love sharing it with you because you just make me think every single time.
Shawn:And I feel like I come out of the conversation better than I was coming into it. So thank you.
Scott:Thank thank you. And I I feel exactly the same way. Exactly the same way.
Shawn:Hooray. Alright,
Scott:my dear. I will see you the next time.
Shawn:Yes. We'll see you the next time.
Scott:Alright.
Shawn:Thanks so much, Scott.
Scott:Alright.
Shawn:Bye. Bye.